


Saturninity

by takethewatch (fraternite)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (or at least my attempt at Romanticism), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Halloween Costumes, actual Romantic Jehan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2519816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/takethewatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Halloween costume shopping with a capital-R Romantic, Grantaire discovers, is a challenging experience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saturninity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lapieuvrebleue](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=lapieuvrebleue).



  
  


"You'll like Jehan," Bossuet told Grantaire. "He's good people."

"He was . . . homeschooled," Grantaire said hesitantly.

"What's wrong with that?" Joly asked, a note of challenge creeping into his voice. Grantaire had only seen Joly actually angry twice in the two months he'd known him, but in both times it had been in defense of friends. He hastened to clarify.

"Nothing--I mean--me. I'm not exactly family friendly." Grantaire grimaced. Jehan wore pastel cardigans (and not with the any-garment-can-be-punk attitude Bahorel wore them) and wrote poetry in a pocket-sized notebook; in the two months that he'd been going to the ABC club, Grantaire had heard him say maybe four sentences in a group setting. "I mean, Jehan seems really . . . I dunno, _nice_. I'm not nice."

"Oh, don't worry about that," Joly said, the irritation sliding off him like melting butter. "Jehan's a great person, but he's not that kind of 'nice.'"

"You guys will get along great," Bossuet agreed. "He's into the same kind of weird stuff you are. I mean, he's poetry, not art--but he likes all that symbolic stuff."

"And darkness."

"Okay, fine," Grantaire said. "I'm texting him now."

"His costume ideas are weird, though," Joly warned.

Grantaire watched the little winged envelope flap away on his phone's screen a little apprehensively. He'd seen Joly and Bossuet's joint costume from last year, after all (well, not in person, but he'd seen the facebook pictures)--it had involved Joly wearing a tuxedo and carrying a purple stuffed moose and Bossuet wearing a bathrobe and two pairs of sunglasses and blue face paint. The whole thing was connected by an elaborate series of puns that Grantaire had never fully grasped, in part because Joly could never get more than halfway through the explanation without dissolving into uncontrollable giggles. If _Joly_ thought Jehan had weird ideas . . . well, maybe Grantaire was making a mistake asking him to go costume shopping.

But beggars--and people who waited until the afternoon of the 30th to throw their costume together--couldn't be choosers. And Jehan was the only person in Grantaire's circle of friends-of-friends who was free on Thursday nights and had a car.

To Grantaire's surprise, Jehan texted right back, saying he LOVED Halloween shopping and the salvation army store was open until 9 on Thursdays and did Grantaire want to meet outside his dorm at 7?

"Told you he'd be up for it," Bossuet said, through a mouthful of pudding.

"Come on," Joly muttered, tapping his foot and looking up at the dining hall clock. "We're going to be late again."

"Why is pudding night always Thursdays?" Bossuet complained. He took one last huge gulp and pushed the rest of the cup toward Grantaire.

"Good luck with the costume shopping!" Joly threw back over his shoulder as he dragged Bossuet toward the door. "Have fun!"

* * *

"So." Jehan began as he pulled onto the highway. "What is your theory of Halloween costuming?"

"My, uh . . ." Grantaire fumbled. "I dunno, didn't it start back in like, the Middle Ages? When people thought there actually were ghosts flying around on Halloween night and, like, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?"

"It dates back to the Celtic festival of Samhain," Jehan said placidly. "But what I actually meant was what kind of costume do you go for? Like do you go clever, or sexy, or impressively constructed--well, apparently not the last one, since Halloween is less than six hours away at this point. Not offense," he added, almost as an afterthought.

"No, that's fair," Grantaire said. "Um, I . . . just try to find something that's not obviously store-bought? Like, nothing that comes out of a bag in a five-piece set. Well, except one year I did a sexy ladybug costume, like, ironically?"

"Okay, so something that you come up with yourself," Jehan said. "So do you want something dark, or something more funny?"

Over the course of the ten-minute car ride, Grantaire found himself discovering more personal beliefs re. the ideal Halloween costume than he had even thought he  _had_ (and revealing a lot about his personality along the way, he suspected. Jehan was a sneaky little kid.)

And still, somehow, when they stepped into the store, everything started to fall apart.

"Okay, so, any ideas what you want to be?" Jehan asked.

Grantaire's best idea so far had been "maybe a zombie or something," but he instinctively felt that suggesting that to Jehan would be a Bad Idea. So he just shrugged and said, "I dunno--that's why Joly and Bossuet said to call you. They said you always had more ideas than you know what to do with."

"Well!" Jehan said, striding off purposefully (although since they were headed toward the cookware department, Grantaire wasn't quite sure what that purpose might be). "You could go as Ennui. Or as a Creeping Malaise."

"Um, how would I . . ." Grantaire started to ask, then realized that even if Jehan did have a very good symbolic representation of Creeping Malaise in mind, Grantaire did not want to spent the entire evening explaining that symbolism. He said instead, "um. I was hoping for more . . . a character? Or a thing or something."

"Okay, there's a lot of great characters you could be," Jehan said. "You could do a great Satan, well okay maybe not the Paradise Lost one, he's supposed to be huge, but what about Mephistopheles, from the Faust legend?"

"Mmm . . . I dunno," Grantaire said slowly. "Usually the only devil costumes there are are the sexy devilessones. And, I mean, I'm not above wearing a sexy costume for ironic purposes, but . . ."

"Not one of those!" Jehan said in horror. "No, for Mephistopheles you'd want an Elizabethan doublet, maybe, and a feathered hat."

Nobody would have any idea what he was. "Okay, maybe . . . do you have any other ideas?"

"Well, in that vein there's all kinds of wonderful Shakespeare characters. Ariel, from the  _Tempest_ would be particularly appropriate for Halloween. Or Puck from  _A Midsummer Night's Dream._ Or you could go for one of the tragedies--if you did Titus Andronicus, you could carry around a pie and offer people some." When Grantaire just stared at him blankly, Jehan explained, "he was the one who killed his daughter's rapists and bakes them into a pie and feeds it to their mother."

"Wow." Jehan's bland delivery of the brutal story was impressive--but Grantaire didn't really relish the prospect of being That Super Morbid Guy At the Party. "But, um, I was hoping for something . . . a little more recognizable? Something I wouldn't have to explain."

That seemed to stump Jehan. "But all the obvious costumes are so derivative."

"A  _slightly_ more popular character?" Grantaire tried.

"Well, you could be the Der Erlkönig," Jehan suggested. He added, without waiting for Grantaire's look of bewilderment, "that's the Elf King."

"Do you mean the guy from the Hobbit, the one who rides the elk?"

Jehan's glare was withering.

And so it went. They wandered around the store, looking for inspiration among the coats and suit jackets, among the women's dresses, even in the bin of craft supplies that Grantaire was pretty sure had all come from the closets of deceased old ladies. Jehan had a lot of ideas, but they were all really bizarre, or really obscure, or just plain morbid. And Grantaire was not only completely out of creativity, but also--and he wasn't even sure why he cared--loathe to disappoint this weird kid with his shitty, "derivative" costume ideas. But after an hour of seemingly speaking completely different languages, he was ready to give up.

Finally, Grantaire burst out in frustration, "Look, can't I just be a shitty pirate or a ninja or something and be done with it?"

Jehan looked at him with a look of utter disgust. "I thought you wanted a  _real_ costume," he said severely. He motioned to the rack of linens behind him. "You might as well just buy a fucking bedsheet."

"I already did that last year," Grantaire groaned. "Worst costume ever. The sheet gets in the way of drinking, but if you take it off you're that loser without any costume at all. And you can't cut a mouth hole, then you just look ridiculous."

Jehan frowned at him, his forehead wrinkling. "How on  _earth_ did you manage to wrap a toga so that you required a mouth hole?"

"Um . . . I was a ghost? Bedsheet, two holes for eyes?"

"Ohhhhh," Jehan said. "I was thinking a vague Greek-slash-Roman. Like frat boys do for toga parties."

"Oh, I never thought of that," Grantaire said. "Man, that's a shitty costume, but it would've been better than the ghost route."

"Wait. What if . . ." Jehan said slowly.

Grantaire hesitated. He suspected he  _might_ be thinking the same thing--but after two hours of talking on completely different wavelengths such an understanding seemed too much to hope for. ". . . if I did both at once?" he ventured.

Jehan's face lit up. "Yes! You could be the ghost of, of--"

"--of democracy?"

"That'll drive Enjolras crazy." Jehan straightened his shoulders and raised his voice in what Grantaire guessed was meant to be an impression of Enjolras. "'A, what the Ancient Athenians had hardly counts as democracy, with women and slaves and poor people having no voice at all in the government; and B, democracy is hardly dead, there are literally hundreds of examples of--"

Grantaire burst out laughing. "Perfect."

They found a white bedsheet for $1.99 and experimented with wrapping methods there in the aisle, trying to find a configuration that was recognizable as a toga but also allowed for one corner of the sheet to be draped over Grantaire's face for the ghost part. A store employee came around the end of the aisle, looked them up and down, and--without batting an eye--informed them that the store would be closing in five minutes. Grantaire hastily untangled himself from the sheet and brought it up to the front to pay, congratulating himself on his cheapest Halloween costume yet.

"What are _you_ going as?" he asked Jehan as they walked out to the car.

"Saturninity," Jehan said matter-of-factly.

"That's . . . um . . . what is that?"

"The condition of being saturnine," Jehan explained, which didn't really help at all. "Which means gloomy or taciturn in temperament. And also suffering from lead poisoning."

"How . . . how do you dress as that?"

"Clown paint, mostly," Jehan said. "Since old cosmetics and circus paint usually had high doses of lead--and then you can get the gloomy side of the meaning by doing a sad face. And I figured I'd bring in the Roman god, too, since he was the god of time and dissolution in addition to architecture and plenty and all that. I wanted to carry rotting fruit, but that seemed impractical. But it's pretty easy to find scythes around Halloween, and that's a symbol of the time passing/aging side of Saturn as well. I thought I'd make the face paint look like of old and worn away, too, to get another image of passing time in there."

Grantaire imagined Jehan calmly toting a scythe around a party in flaking clown paint, and shivered. "That's going to be fucking terrifying."

Jehan smiled serenely. "Thank you."

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to pilferingapples and automnale for suggestions of the kind of Halloween costumes a Romantic might be into!
> 
> Jehan's costume, btw, actually has a very long and convoluted historical explanation: Gérard de Nerval, the actual Romantic friend of Victor Hugo who Jehan's character may be based on, wrote a poem that begins with the line, "Je suis le ténébreux"; which means something in the general direction of "I am the gloomy one" (or possibly "I am gloom"? I'm a little shaky on the translation, especially since the Wikipedia article all my extensive research comes from did not give the full context of the line). "Gloominess" wasn't an interesting enough concept to depict, but ténébreux can also be translated "saturnine"--which once I looked it up turned out to lend itself pretty well to a costume that is really creepy in exactly NOT the way Jehan intended it.


End file.
